Gazing up at the up at the roof of the reconstruction of the cave at Lascaux in southwestern France, it is a stunning realisation that the magnificent paintings were drawn some 17 000 years ago. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Sistine Chapel of Prehistory’, this artistic marvel was painted at a time when the northern hemisphere was about to emerge from the steely grip of the ice age. This sense of wonderment is compounded by the knowledge that the more recent discovery of similar paintings in the Chauvet cave, in the Ardeche region of France, has been dated as much as 15 000 years earlier. So, more than 10 000 years before the first recognised civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt emerged, over many thousands of years, the ice-age hunters of Europe were producing these extraordinary examples of creativity.

Confronted by so much talent so long ago a stream of questions arises. Where did these people come from? Where did they go? What were conditions like at the time? What happened to the skills they had developed? Did the changes in the climate that followed explain why they faded from view? What happened to the skills they had developed? What were the consequences of this apparently frustrated development?

Answers to these questions, and many more, are starting to emerge from two areas of science that have transformed our understanding of the development of humankind in prehistory. First, we can draw on advances in climate change studies of recent decades.